Thursday, December 07, 2006

One time MP, and presidential candidate, Leszek Bubel gets locked up. But is it for his anti-Semitism or is he just nuts?

Prosecutors in Bialystok have ordered that Bubel be detained for ‘spreading anti-Semitic hate speech and text’ and will be ordered to have psychiatric tests. This is not the first time that he has been charged with such offenses.

Last year he was charged under the Polish penal code (Art. 257), which prohibits ‘insulting individuals because of their ethnic, national, racial and religious affiliation,’ and carries a maximum charge of three years in prison. Bubel got off with a 5,000 zloty fine.

He had a written a pamphlet called ‘Polish-Jewish battle of the Crosses’ in which he had written gibberish such as ‘Jews brains are circumcised’ and other weirdo bullshit.

The guy is certainly very odd indeed. He was a candidate for president for the Polish National Party (Polska Partia Narodowa) during the presidential elections last year and received 0.13% of the vote (about the same as the LPR candidate got in the recent Warsaw local election, in fact).

He was elected to the Polish parliament 1991-93 as a member of the Beer Lover’s Party (until the party split into factions, as all Polish political parties inevitably do, into the Big Beer Party and the Little Beer Party).

He has run a number of magazines including Nasze Polska (Our Poland) and a bi-monthly Tylko Polska (Only Poland), both regularly and fanatically anti-Semitic and are what would be known these days as ‘Holocaust denial’ publications.

He also appears to have had some links as a publisher with Samoobrona, the party that is currently embroiled in their very own Monika Lewinsky-type sex scandal.

So, a thoroughly bad egg in everyone’s book, bar the most carpet-chewing of racists, that is.

And maybe he is a complete nutcase. But I hope the psychiatric tests he is being ordered to undergo are medical in nature and not because of his distasteful political activities.

And should an odorous nutter like Bubel be arrested and charged for ‘hate speech’? What he says is obviously so stupid and prejudiced that only the most extreme or mentally deranged would take any notice of him.

Much better would be to let him speak, let him hate, and let the rest of us deal with him as we see fit – or, even better, completely ignore him.